Last winter I went to the ACC Championship Game so I could join a few friends in their consistent tradition of long road trips to see Virginia Tech lose to Florida State. We slept in Savannah. As we were leaving the motel room, some girls were walking by.

“Is this a good place to stay?” they asked. “It’s not horrible, is it?”

One of my friends responded. “Sure, it’s okay.”

Now, I thought that was kind of a hilarious question. I mean, you’ve already booked the room. What are you going to do now? I suppose you could ask for a refund maybe, but that seems weird. I wouldn’t do that. And what are we going to say? The TV gets really loud if you turn up the volume? The hot water doesn’t grant magical powers? Watch out for the fact that it’s a motel just like pretty much every motel I’ve ever stayed at? Seriously. I mean, I know that what the girls asked was a perfectly normal, reasonable, and legitimate thing to say to another human being in those exact circumstances, but it just struck me as also kind of hilarious in a way that I wanted to express.

The problem was that this entire train of thought passed through my brain in its entirety that morning. My friend said later that he saw the gears turning in my head. The girls had said “thanks” to him, turned, and walked probably 20 feet down the hallway before I managed to say, with a stupid grin on my face, causing at least one of the girls to half turn around with an awkward, “what is happening” expression on her face: